
THE 



ARRIVAL OF THE PILGRIMS 



By 
John Franklin Jameson, Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D. 



A Lecture 

Delivered at Brown University, Providence, R. I, 

November 21, 1920 

Printed by the University 



THE 



ARRIVAL OF THE PILGRIMS 



By 
John Franklin Jameson, Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D. 

Director of the Department 
OF Historical Research in the 
Carnegie Institution OF Wash- 
ington; Formerly Professor OF 
History in Brown University 



A Lecture Delivered at 

Brown University, Providence, R. I. 

November 21, 1920 



Printed by the University 
ig20 



■ J3 






THE ARRIVAL OF THE PILGRIMS 



ON a Saturday afternoon in November, 1620, 
on a day that would now be called the twenty- 
first, a small ship, of one hundred and eighty tons 
in the reckoning of that time, sailed into the bleak 
harbor at the extremity of Cape Cod. Today, three 
hundred years later, at the suggestion of the Presi- 
dent of the United States, the event is being com- 
memorated in thousands of American towns and 
villages. Last summer the initial stages of the same 
voyage were commemorated with impressive cere- 
monies by the Dutch at Leyden and Rotterdam and 
by the English at Southampton and Plymouth. We 
may well ask the question, and indeed it is the pur- 
pose for which we have come together this evening, 
to ask the question, and if we can to answer it. 
Why should this event be celebrated so extensively 
and with so much emphasis at the end of three hun- 
dred years? 

May I say for myself and for my own simple part 
in the services this evening that I respond always 
with great pleasure to every invitation to return to 
Providence, where during thirteen years it was my 
happy privilege to teach, where I formed lifelong 
connections with the best of friends, and where 
every kindness was constantly bestowed upon me. 

I also think it proper to say, that I responded to 
the invitation of President Faunce with greater 
alacrity because it was based upon a general sugges- 



tion made by the President of the United States, 
that this day should be thus commemorated. To 
me the suggestion or request comes not only as an 
official call, but as one strengthened by personal 
feeling and rooted in old remembrances of my first 
years in Brown University and of years at the Johns 
Hopkins University before that. My mind goes 
back to days now thirty years in the past, but which 
some of you will well remember, when the Brown 
University Lecture Association was organized, pri- 
marily for the purpose of having lectures in history 
and political science delivered to members and 
friends of the University in Manning Hall, and when 
the most attractive of its lectures were a series on 
municipal government given by a young professor, of 
brilliant speech and engaging manners, who from 
time to time came over for the purpose from Wes- 
leyan University at Middletown. Many were then 
impressed with his political sagacity as well as with 
his gifts of exposition, though none, I am sure, of 
those who met him on these occasions, nor I myself, 
had any notion of the remarkable career that lay 
before him. He was my warm friend in those earlier 
days, and though I have naturally made no attempt 
to seek intimacy with him during his years in 
Washington, and am well aware that these years 
have been checkered with mistakes and marred 
by the operation of one great defect, I can not fail 
to regard with deep feeling whatever is said by him 
from that high office. I can not fail to regard as 



invested with special force a request to commemorate 
the Pilgrims, that comes from one who has shown 
himself so great a master of American history, and 
who, Southern born and Southern bred, has never 
failed to show in his writings acute perception and 
high appreciation of the work of Pilgrim and Puri- 
tan. I can not fail to remember the exaltation and 
devoted feeling with which he has conceived of 
himself as the continuator of the Pilgrims' work into 
the wider sphere of political activity into which the 
opening vistas of the twentieth century permit us 
to look. Here in this university, where I always 
thought it the main duty of a professor of history to 
preach fairness and openness of mind, I of course 
try to look at his career with serenity and detach- 
ment, to see his record as it is, with all its blemishes. 
But as I think of him, prematurely old, stricken, 
disappointed yet undismayed, ending a memorable 
administration in obloquy and with the appearance, 
temporary or permanent, of tragic failure, I cannot 
but think of the words with which Milton, in the 
second sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, speaks of the loss 
of his eyes: 

Yet I argue not 
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot 
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer 
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask? 
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied 
In liberty's defense, my noble task, 
Of which all Europe rings from side to side. 



But to ask again our question: Why do we cele- 
brate the arrival of that little ship, three hundred 
years ago, in that lonely harbor? Not, surely, be- 
cause the event in itself was brilliant or imposing. 
Bearing its crowded company of one hundred or one 
hundred and two passengers the little ship came to 
an anchor on that Saturday afternoon. On the next 
day they kept the Sabbath. On the Monday some 
of the men went ashore and did a little exploring. 
The eighteen wives, or such of them as were able to 
stand and walk, also went ashore, and did their 
family washing. Eighteen wives, of whom by the 
ensuing April only four were still living! Contrast 
all this with some of the Spanish landings to the 
southward — of Cortez, or Pizarro, or de Soto, when 
formidable bodies of Spanish infantry, with cavalry 
and artillery, came ashore, unfurled with imposing 
ceremony the royal standard of Castile and Leon, 
or the imperial flag of Charles the Fifth, and listened 
to the reading of pompous proclamations of their 
high master, 

"All the while 
Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds." 

It may be that there is something impressive, as 
certainly there is something pathetic, in the spec- 
tacle of those eighteen brave women proceeding 
with housewifely rigor to that humble Monday 
duty to which tomorrow eighteen million American 
women will address themselves with the like faith- 



ful ardor, and carrying it through in the chilly air 
of late November (some of them doubtless getting 
their death-colds in the process), but it does not 
make a brilliant or picturesque scene. 

Neither do we celebrate the day because the 
settlement which these devoted men and women 
came to found attained great physical dimensions, 
so that their colony became itself, as did the Massa- 
chusetts colony, one of the great political entities of 
this world. It had a brief career of seventy years, 
and when it was absorbed into its more powerful 
neighbor, it had not above thirteen thousand in- 
habitants; nor is the area which it covered, to this 
day, one of the most important or influential portions 
of our great republic. 

Neither do we celebrate the day because the little 
band of exiles who then came for the first time into 
an American harbor, or, in the case of the strongest, 
set foot for the first time on American soil, were 
themselves great or brilliant or important person- 
ages. A dozen of the men were members of the 
English middle class, men with some education and 
some property, substantial yeomen or small mer- 
chants but nothing more, and the rest were of even 
humbler standing, in an age when standing counted 
far more, far more severely limited men's careers, 
than it does now. 

Here, however, if I may digress for a moment, I 
should like to draw attention to one aspect of their 
worldly condition to which I think too little attention 



10 

has perhaps been given by most of those who have 
considered their story. I do not think it is customary 
to give due weight to the fact that most of them had 
lived for a dozen years in Holland. Those who had 
migrated to Amsterdam in 1608 and Leyden in 
1609, had in England been for the most part dwellers 
in rural villages or small towns. Not a few of those 
who hear me may have visited the ancient hamlets 
of Scrooby and Austerfield from which, or the 
vicinity of which, a considerable number of them are 
known to have come. Pleasing villages they are, 
and must have been in the days of the migration. 
The little church at Austerfield, in which William 
Bradford was baptised, is a venerable and beauti- 
ful monument of antiquity, coming down in part from 
the eleventh or twelfth century, and so is the some- 
what larger church of Scrooby, almost equally old. 
They are well adapted to bestow on village minds 
such enlightenment as comes from old religion, 
hallowed associations, and long continued peace. 
The quiet scenery of that somewhat tame portion 
of the English countryside had also other value and 
other inspiration. But life in these villages, or the 
life of humble artisans in Gainsborough or Boston or 
Lincoln in the early part of the seventeenth century, 
was certainly sluggish and contracted and parochial. 
To migrate from that environment to the two great 
cities of Holland, and to dwell in the most intellec- 
tual of these for a dozen years, close by a university 
that was already the most famous Protestant 



11 

university in Europe, would surely have its effect 
in awakening the Pilgrim mind to wider and more 
active thought and to more tolerant as well as more 
ingenious habits of mind. 

The Pilgrims themselves were not unaware of 
some of the mental effects of the transition. Says 
Bradford : 

"Being now come into the Low Countries, they 
saw many goodly and fortified cities, strongly walled 
and garded with tropes of armed men. Also they 
heard a strange and uncouth language, and beheld 
the differente manners and custumes of the people, 
with their strange fashions and attires; all so farre 
differing from that of their plaine countrie villages 
(wherin they were bred, and had so longe lived) as 
it seemed they were come into a new world. But these 
were not the things they much looked on, or long 
tooke up their thoughts; for they had other work in 
hand, and an other kind of warr to wage and main- 
taine. For though they saw faire and bewtifuU 
cities, flowing with abundance of all sorts of welth 
and riches, yet it was not longe before they saw 
the grimme and grisly face of povertie coming upon 
them like an armed man, with whom they must 
bukle and incounter, and from whom they could not 
flye; but they were armed with faith and patience 
against him, and all his encounters; and though 
they were sometimes foyled, yet by Gods assistance 
they prevailed and got the victorie." 

I do not think that the relative positions of Eng- 



12 

land and the Netherlands in 1609 are rightly under- 
stood by most of those who read about the Pil- 
grims. In 1609, and still more in 1620, Holland, at 
any rate, the chief and most advanced of the Dutch 
provinces, was in several respects considerably more 
advanced intellectually and in point of general 
civilization than England, Amsterdam rather more 
the center of the world's enlightenment than London, 
and certainly the University of Leyden superior to 
those of Oxford and Cambridge. Quite apart from 
that transition from the life of small rural villages 
to that of busy and enterprising cities upon the 
effects of which Bradford comments, it may be 
maintained with a good deal of force that migration 
from England to Holland at just that time was 
migration from a less civilized to a more civilized 
country. The Netherlands had a smaller population 
than England, and they were less rich in natural 
resources, but during the forty years through which 
they had been conducting against Spain their war 
of independence, they had progressed enormously. 
The very fact of independence had given them wider 
horizons and new energy. The conduct of their 
political and economic affairs had been in the hands 
of city-dwellers, of commercial magnates, with 
urban minds and that wide knowledge of the world 
which commerce brings. Their commerce had 
increased by leaps and bounds. Their great East 
India Company and their other trading organiza- 
tions had already in 1609 begun to flood the country 



13 



with wealth. Art and letters were already beginning 
to take on that brilliant development that made the 
years of Prince Frederick Henry the Golden Age of 
Dutch history. Moreover, the very years which the 
Pilgrims spent in Leyden were the twelve years of 
truce with Spain, during which the advancement of 
Holland proceeded at a rate exceptionally rapid, so 
that whatever advantages she had in the compari- 
son in 1609 were heightened in 1620, and the Pil- 
grims during their sojourn were witnesses of an 
economic progress and of a social advance such as 
has seldom been seen in twelve years of the history 
of any small nation. From all quarters of Europe, 
too, merchants and travellers were constantly bring- 
ing fresh varieties of intelligence, whose influence 
even humble English artisans in Leyden, or, at any 
rate, their leaders, could not escape. Most important 
of all, the province of Holland was far in advance of 
other states of the world in respect to the tolerance 
of all varieties of religious opinion. Jewish exiles 
from Spain and Portugal, orthodox like those who 
filled the richest of the world's synagogues (that of 
Amsterdam), or heretical like Benedict Spinoza, 
Socinians from Transylvania or Poland, Greeks and 
Russians, Catholics and every variety of Protestant, 
found here a hospitable home and an undisturbed 
opportunity to think and to discourse. The superior 
tolerance which always marked the Plymouth 
Colony in contrast to that of Massachusetts Bay 
cannot have been due solely to the mild and gentle 



14 

character which Brewster and Bradford impressed 
upon their settlement at its foundation. In large 
measure it must have been due to the beneficent 
operation upon Pilgrim minds of the intelligent toler- 
ance which they had seen to prevail under the 
government of the Dutch magistrates, and from 
which they themselves had profited so largely. 

Amsterdam in those days was smaller indeed than 
London, with a population of perhaps 100,000 in 
comparison with perhaps 250,000 in the English 
capital; but it was in just those years a city of 
more enterprise and energy than London, expand- 
ing with extraordinary rapidity, and reaching out 
through commercial channels into all quarters of 
the globe. 

Leyden, on the other hand, was the chief manu- 
facturing town of Holland. Its population in these 
years was about 60,000. Thus it was much smaller 
than London; but very few of the Pilgrims had 
ever lived in London, and Leyden was perhaps three 
times as large as any other English city or town. 
The manufacture of cloth was its leading industry, 
and most of the Pilgrims, tillers of the soil hitherto, 
turned their hands to the work of weaving. Hand- 
weavers, it is known, are prone to think, and in the 
atmosphere of Leyden there was much to stimulate 
the intellect. A stone's throw from the social center 
of the Separatist congregation — the house of their 
pastor, John Robinson — stood the chief hall of the 
University of Leyden, which in the 350 years of its 



15 

existence has probably maintained a higher average 
level of eminence in its professors than any other of 
the old universities of Europe. Justus Lipsius and 
Joseph Scaliger, most learned of all men, had taught 
there just before the Pilgrims' time. Daniel Heinsius 
and Jacob Arminius were teaching there in their 
day. We know that Robinson attended the lectures 
of Arminius, and took part, modestly but effectively, 
in the debates which raged around that celebrated 
theologian. It is certain that not only Robinson, 
but Elder Brewster, who occupied himself with the 
printing of books, and those who assisted in his 
printing-house, and especially William Bradford, 
with his well-trained and open mind, always eager 
for fuller and better knowledge, must have profited 
largely by the neighborhood of these brilliant intel- 
lectual influences. It is almost equally certain that 
those influences filtered among the rank and file of 
the congregation, those humble artisans of whose 
pleasant and close relations with the people of the 
city Bradford gives us so agreeable a picture. 

"So," says Bradford, "they lefte the goodly and 
pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place 
near 12 years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, 
and looked not much on those things, but lift up 
their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and 
quieted their spirits." 

Some writers have made much larger claims of 
Dutch influence upon the Pilgrim mind, and through 
it, upon all America. There have been a few who 



16 

have even gone so far as to declare with great empha- 
sis that our federal system and our habit of the 
written constitution, since the English did not have 
them, must have come to us from the Dutch. It is 
true that the seven Dutch provinces in 1620 were a 
confederation, and that that confederation had a 
written constitution. But surely there is a natural 
history of federal governments, wherein we see the 
operation of similar causes producing similar results, 
without the need of resorting to the hypothesis of 
imitation. Public men are but little accustomed, 
unless in some great hurry, to adopt the institutions 
of another country, but much more likely to seek 
for expedients that will meet the exigencies which 
immediately confront them and satisfy the people 
who have appointed them to legislate. Federal 
governments come into existence because states or 
communities hitherto independent feel the need of 
union, for the sake of greater security or power, but 
are not yet ready to merge their individuality in that 
of a unitary state. Because the Australian colonies 
have come together in a federal commonwealth, 
shall we conclude that they must have been at some 
time subjected to powerful Dutch or Swiss influ- 
ences of which we have not heard before? And as to 
the written constitution, can we imagine states 
coming together to form a union and not setting 
down in writing the terms of their agreement? 

Somewhat more of a case may be made out for 
Dutch influence in the formation of the New Eng- 



17 

land Confederation of 1643, by which the colonies 
of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and 
New Haven united for common defence against the 
Dutch of New Netherland, the French, and the 
Indians. The prime fact of confederation is seen 
to have been due to causes obvious enough and which 
require no supposition of Dutch influence upon the 
movement in general; and Plymouth, which had 
had the greatest amount of contact with the Dutch, 
was the least influential of the four confederates. 
Some features of the plan, however, may easily be 
held to show the influence of Dutch models, and there 
are some portions of the early New England legis- 
lation which show that some of the excellencies of 
the Dutch legal system had not escaped the atten- 
tion of our early law-makers. But in the main we 
are to seek the traces of Dutch influence upon the 
Plymouth mind in a greater mildness and tolerance 
than was customary among the English, and a 
greater degree of general intelligence than would be 
expected, in that age, of peasants who had never 
strayed far from villages of the English countryside. 
A long digression, but it may have helped us to 
understand better the company of forty-one men and 
eighteen women that sailed into harbor upon the 
Mayflower that Saturday afternoon in November, 
1620, and to appreciate more rightly the nature of 
the action which those men took that day and 
which makes it memorable. For, to answer our 
question, we celebrate the day primarily because it 



18 

is the three hundredth anniversary of the May- 
flower Compact. The day which has been most 
commonly celebrated in memory of the Pilgrims is 
the twenty-first of December, as being the day on 
which their vanguard made its famous landing at 
Plymouth, but that is perhaps because the habit 
of observing the day began at Plymouth (in 1769), 
and to those who instituted the observance there it 
was natural to commemorate first of all the arrival 
of the Pilgrims at their ultimate home. The great 
event, however, the one most invested with sig- 
nificance for the future, was that which took place 
in Provincetown harbor. Gathering together, pre- 
sumably in the cabin of the Mayflower, they set 
their hands to what Bradford calls "a combination 
made by them before they came ashore, being the 
first foundation of their governmente in this place." 
It is fitting to repeat the old and familiar text: 

"In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are 
underwriten, the loyall subjects of our dread sov- 
eraigne Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of 
Great Britaine, Franc, and Ireland king, defender of 
the faith, etc., haveing undertaken, for the glorie of 
God, and advancemente of the Christian faith, and 
honour of our king and countrie, a voyage to plant 
the first colonie in the Northerne parts of Virginia, 
doe by these presents solemnly and mutualy in the 
presence of God, and one of another, covenant and 
combine our selves togeather into a civill body 
politick, for our better ordering and preservation 



19 

and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by vertue 
hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame shuch just 
and equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, 
and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought 
most meete and convenient for the generall good of 
the Colonic, unto which we promise all due submis- 
sion and obedience. In witnes wherof we have 
hereunder subscribed our names at Cap-Codd the 
11. of November, in the year of the raigne of our 
soveraigne lord, King James, of England, France, 
and Ireland the eighteenth, and of Scotland the 
liftie fourth. Anno Dom. 1620." 

The origin of this agreement is explained by their 
chronicler. He says that it was occasioned partly 
by the discontented and mutinous speeches that 
some of the strangers amongst them had let fall in 
the ship, that when they came ashore they would 
use their own liberty, for none had power to com- 
mand them, because the patent they had was for 
Virginia and not for New England, with which the 
Virginia Company had nothing to do; and partly 
that their act of agreement might be as firm as any 
patent, and in some respects more sure. 

The meaning of this is, that before their departure 
from Holland the Pilgrim Company had obtained a 
patent from the Virginia Company, but now, evi- 
dently, were about to settle outside the limits of its 
jurisdiction. The organization commonly called the 
Virginia Company had under its charter the right to 
form settlements and exercise jurisdiction any- 



20 

where on the American coast between thirty-five 
and forty-one degrees north latitude. In 1619 and 
1620 the company was much disposed to encourage 
the formation of what they called "particular 
plantations," settlements which enterprising in- 
dividuals, or groups of individuals having a certain 
unity, agreed to form and maintain at their own 
expense as organisms subordinate to the chief 
colonial organization that centered in Jamestown. 
Several plantations in Virginia had this subordinate 
character and maintained it for some years. To 
encourage such increase of population to their 
thinly settled province, the Virginia Company was 
well content to recognize in such bodies a certain 
independence of its regulations and a certain free- 
dom of action. In the Division of Manuscripts in 
the Library of Congress are preserved, as one of its 
most treasured possessions, two volumes of the 
records of the Virginia Company's meetings in these 
very years from 1619 to 1624. In the record of a 
meeting in February, 1620, we read, "It was ordered 
allso by generall Consent that such Captaines or 
leaders of Perticulerr Plantations that shall goe 
there to inhabite by vertue of their Grants and 
Plant themselves, their Tennantes and Servantes in 
Virginia, shall have liberty till a forme of Govern- 
ment be here settled for them, Associating unto 
them divers of the gravest and discreetes of their 
Companies, to make Orders, Ordinances and Con- 
stitutions, for the better orderinge and dyrectinge 



21 



of their Servants and buisines Provided they be not 
Repugnant to the Lawes of England." Now this 
order was passed on the very day that the patent to 
John Pierce and his associates for Plymouth was 
"allowed and Sealed in viewe of the Courte with a 
Total approbation." 

If the Pilgrims had been able to act under such a 
patent as this, the patent they brought out with 
them for instance, they would have been possessed 
of certain powers of framing rules or orders for their 
own government, certain powers, that is, of local 
legislation. If authority derived from the Virginia 
Company could not be recognized as valid in forty- 
two degrees of north latitude, it was natural to sub- 
stitute for it an authority as closely analogous as 
possible, and one sufficient for the purposes, authority 
derived from the common consent of colonists, who, 
if unable to consider themselves under the juris- 
diction of the Virginia Company as they had planned, 
must then consider themselves as authorized to act 
in a similar manner under the direct authority of 
their dread sovereign lord, the king of Great Britain. 

That a form of government such as they here 
instituted was contemplated before they left Hol- 
land, is plain from a passage which we find in the 
final letter of advice which their pastor wrote to 
the whole company at the time of their departure, 
and which was carried with them from Delfthaven 
and read to the assembled colonists at Southampton. 
Among the many advantages which the Pilgrims 



22 

had enjoyed at Leyden, some of which have already 
been mentioned, not the least, perhaps the greatest, 
was in the possession of so wise and beautiful a 
spirit as that of John Robinson; for, says Bradford, 
"besides his singular abilities in divine things 
(wherein he excelled) he was also very able to give 
directions in civil affairs, and to foresee dangers and 
inconveniences; by which means he was very help- 
ful to their outward estates, and was in every way 
as a common father unto them." Nowhere are his 
foresight and his wisdom better shown than in that 
passage of the parting letter read at Southampton 
which relates to matters of government. It runs as 
follows : 

"Lastly, wheras you are become a body politik, 
using amongst your selves civill goverments, and 
are not furnished with any persons of spetiall emi- 
nencie above the rest, to be chosen by you into 
office of goverment, let your wisdome and godlines 
appeare, not only in chusing shuch persons as doe 
entirely love and will promote the commone good, 
but also in yeelding unto them all due honour and 
obedience in their lawfuU administrations; not be- 
houlding in them the ordinarinesse of their persons, 
but Gods ordinance for your good, not being like 
the foolish multitud who more honour the gay 
coate, than either the vertuous minde of the man, 
or glorious ordinance of the Lord. But you know 
better things, and that the image of the Lords 
power and authoritie which the magistrate beareth, 



23 

is honourable, in how meane persons soever. And 
this dutie you both may the more willingly and 
ought the more conscionably to performe, because 
you are at least for the present to have only them 
for your ordinarie governours, which your selves 
shall make choyse of for that worke." 

The nature of the Mayflower Compact has often 
been misjudged. It has sometimes been spoken of 
as if it established in America an independent 
republic, and this in spite of the plain acknowl- 
edgment of subjection to the king of Great Britain 
with which the document opens. In reality it was a 
temporary measure, adopted in order to take the 
place of a patent whose usefulness was at an end, 
and perhaps in strictness serving only until the 
arrival of the Fortune a year later, bringing a patent 
from the Council for New England differing mainly 
from the first and discarded patent in its territorial 
grant. From the date of the arrival of that second 
patent, the settlers of Plymouth found in it clear 
authority for the scheme of government which they 
had already adopted. It grants in terms the authority 
"by the consent of the greater part of them to estab- 
lish such laws and ordinances as are for their better 
government, and the same, by such officer or 
officers as they shall by most voice elect and choose, 
to put in execution." The same provision is found 
in the patent granted to Cushman and Winslow in 
January, 1623, for the settlement at Cape Ann, and 
also in the colony patent of 1629, granted by the 



24 

Council for New England to William Bradford and 
his associates. 

It is true that such an agreement, made under 
such circumstances, would actually bring into exis- 
tence a polity different in fact from that which had 
hitherto been usual in attempts, even English 
attempts, to establish colonies in America. The 
usual method, in those times, in instituting govern- 
ment for any place outlying from England, was to 
entrust the control of affairs to those members of 
the body whose personal status, whose condition in 
life, marked them out as beings of a superior order, 
to whom the right of ruling belonged by the decree 
of heaven. The English world and every portion of 
it was to be ruled by noblemen and gentlemen; 
others were called upon simply to obey their betters 
and to do their duty in that station to which it 
had pleased God to call them. But Robinson fore- 
saw and the fact was, that the actual composition 
of their company, lacking the bright presence of 
noblemen and gentlemen and unprovided with 
rulers appointed by the gracious hand of their 
monarch, would naturally lead them into a polity 
in which the right to rule was not conferred by 
previous status, might be lodged in persons of little 
worldly eminence, but was to be exercised by ordi- 
nary men whom ordinary men designated for the 
purpose and who were to be duly respected for that 
very reason. 

In a sense, this temporary government, with its 



26 



power to make regulations by common consent, was 
like that which royal charters conferred upon English 
municipalities, wherein townsmen, authorized by 
their charter so to do, made by-laws for their own 
government and elected officers who were com- 
missioned to enforce them— all under the authority 
of the British crown. Higher than any powers 
derived from letters patent, or even from the 
charter of a colonizing company, was the right of an 
English subject. "Go where he would, so long as 
he settled on land claimed by England and acknowl- 
edged allegiance to the English crown, the English- 
man carried with him as much of the common law 
of England as was applicable to his station and was 
not repugnant to his other rights and privileges." 
The colonist in Virginia and in New Plymouth was 
guaranteed the possession and enjoyment of all the 
liberties, franchises, and immunities that he would 
have had if he had been born in England itself and 
had continued to dwell there, with the exception, 
of course, of those which his very distance forbade 
him to exercise. 

But though the Mayflower Compact was a tem- 
porary device, and government under it alone con- 
tinued but a year, the event of its signing is never- 
theless of the greatest significance and highly worthy 
of commemoration. To appreciate what it meant, 
let us take a glance at the world of 1620 in the light 
of the years that have succeeded. The civilized 
world of 1620 was Europe. Through toil and 



26 

trouble lasting through centuries, European man- 
kind had learned how to abide under orderly govern- 
ment, how to remain at peace most of the time, 
how to go on year after year, in city and town and 
village, maintaining the industries and intercourse 
of civilized life with that fair measure of law- 
abiding spirit and respect for the rights of others 
that enables men to prosper, to make at least a 
living, to dwell in a sense of security, and to give a 
chance to those forces that make for the improve- 
ment of men and communities. But that which lay 
before the future was. the problem of expanding this 
orderly civilization to the filling of the other great 
divisions of the world, of America especially and of 
Africa. It is not too much to say that the chief 
matter of the three centuries that have since elapsed 
has been the building up of civilized life in America. 
I remember that I quoted six years ago in this 
place a passage from Darwin in which, with that 
quiet deliberation which gave to his utterances so 
much of their weight, he said of the essential process 
in our history, "Looking to the distant future, I do 
not think that the Rev. Mr. Zincke takes an exag- 
gerated view when he says, 'All other series of events 
— as that which resulted in the culture of mind in 
Greece, and that which resulted in the Empire of 
Rome — only appear to have purpose and value when 
viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary 
to'. . . the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration 
to the west." 



27 

We have here in the United States, and the last 
few years have made it plain to all mankind, the 
greatest power the world has ever seen, an aggrega- 
tion of civilized humanity more important, destined 
to fill a larger place in history, than the Roman 
Empire which for more than a thousand years so 
dominated the minds of men. To the north of us 
lies a great nation, which is kin to our own and in 
some respects of orderly submission to self-govern- 
ment surpasses us. Great areas to the southward are 
filled with republics which less perfectly maintain 
the ideals of self-government indeed, but which 
after all, by the influence of those ideals and the 
pervading sense of common origin, a common religion 
and language, and a common relation to the civiliza- 
tion of the Spanish peninsula, are preserved in a 
general state of peace as impressive and almost as 
complete as the famous Pax Romana, and brightened 
with hopes of progress which the Roman Empire 
never acquired. 

If from the standpoint of 1620 we could look for- 
ward into the three centuries which since have 
passed, could see that the main movement of the 
future would be the occupation of the waste places 
of the earth, in North America, South America, and 
Africa, should we not perceive, with trembling 
apprehension, that all the hope of the future de- 
pended upon the question whether the European 
man could stand the strain of so great a transition? 
Much of his acquiescence in settled order obviously 



28 

depended upon the conservative inertia of one who 
dwells where his fathers dwelt and who has no 
other institutions than those which have grown up 
around him in a fixed locality. Could he go forth in 
masses into the new world and spread over its 
numerous unoccupied areas, and still retain most of 
what was valuable in the civilization he had 
acquired? 

The very intelligent counsellors who surrounded 
the King of Spain foresaw this problem in no small 
degree, and attempted to solve it in a manner accord- 
ing to their prepossessions. To them it seemed 
indispensable that Spaniards coming to America, 
to whatever remote part of it, should not escape from 
the long arm of the law. They regulated their new 
world from Madrid and from Seville with minute 
care and abundant and often wise legislation. They 
provided administrative machinery marked by much 
ingenuity, sent out many well-qualified officials, 
and devised still further machinery for bringing to 
book those whom they had sent out to administer 
what they had decreed. It was not all in vain. 
Spanish administration was far from being a failure. 
Much in it was excellent, and much that we find 
defective in the government and procedure of 
Spanish America of today is in larger degree the 
effect of predominating Indian blood than of what- 
ever weaknesses there were in the Spanish adminis- 
trative system. 

Nevertheless there was a better way by which the 



29 

great problem, as momentous as any problem that 
has lain before the human mind, might be solved. 
No one would now doubt that the problem of the 
government of very remote communities is best 
solved if those communities can be made able and 
willing to govern themselves. To the Spaniards, the 
Portuguese, the French, and the Dutch of 1620 such 
a proposal would have seemed unnatural. Their 
colonies were to be governed by qualified persons 
whom they sent out to govern, and in the absence of 
such important representatives of European authority 
their colonial communities were usually helpless. But 
there was something in the Anglo-Saxon, however 
or whensoever acquired, that enabled him, and 
has almost always enabled him, to rise to such situa- 
tions. The Mayflower Compact was but the first of a 
long line of instances in which that ability to supply 
the lack of external authority by the assumption of 
self-government has shown itself. Everyone here 
present knows how in 1636, when Roger Williams 
and his associates were establishing the town of 
Providence on territory which seemed to lie outside 
the jurisdiction of any constituted authority, they 
framed and signed a similar agreement, influenced 
possibly by Williams's residence in Plymouth, but 
naturally evoked by the circumstances in which he 
and his companions found themselves. Its text may 
be compared with that of the compact signed in the 
cabin of the Mayflower sixteen years before. 

"We whose names are hereunder written, being 



30 

desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do 
promise to submit ourselves, in active or passive 
obedience, to all such orders or agreements as shall 
be made for public good of the body, in an orderly 
way, by the major consent of the present inhabi- 
tants, masters of families incorporated together into 
a township, and such others as they shall admit into 
the same — only in civil things." 

Very likely the form of such compacts is In some 
degree derived from that of the church covenants 
into which Separatist congregations of that day 
were accustomed to enter. Possibly there may have 
been some influence from the form of the so-called 
"associations," or signed agreements to persevere in 
a given course of political action, which, in the days 
before the rise of political parties, had done service 
on several occasions in English and Scottish history, 
beginning in England with the Association of 1584, 
the agreement to oppose and pursue all those who 
should seek to compass the death of Queen Elizabeth. 
But the real cause of the framing of such docu- 
ments was that men of the English race found them- 
selves outside the jurisdiction of constituted authori- 
ties, yet, through long habituation to local self- 
government or to other incidents of settled order 
in English villages, found it intolerable to be with- 
out definite basis for government, and improvised 
one by common action to take the place of what in 
those days would more normally have been supplied 
by the crown, as it had been in the case of James- 



31 

town. Several other agreements of the sort, planta- 
tion covenants as they were sometimes called, like 
that which bound together the settlers at Hampton, 
New Hampshire, may be found in the early annals 
of our colonies. At a later period, in the days of the 
Revolution and later, settlers in Vermont or Ken- 
tucky or the Northwest Territory, when they found 
themselves outside the range of state governments or 
on land so much in dispute that no state could exer- 
sise a recognized authority, formed similar temporary 
compacts for the government of their own affairs. 
Later, beyond the Mississippi, claim associations of 
squatters, communities of miners in valleys inacces- 
sible to the arm of the law, Americans who had 
gone outside the ascertained boundaries of the 
United States yet deemed themselves to be still 
within its protection, have framed similar com- 
pacts, by which they have agreed to abide by the 
decision of the majority and to obey the laws and 
the magistrates which they themselves have made. 
The American does multitudes of things by volun- 
tary association or informal agreement which the 
European expects to see done by governmental 
regulation or on governmental initiative. By the 
opening years of the twentieth century we have 
arrived at a period when even college students 
govern themselves, nay more, when even small 
boys, ferae naturae, govern themselves admirably in 
organizations of Boy Scouts, and solemnly administer 
a justice little tempered by mercy — nay, most 



32 

remarkable of all, when, without compulsion of law 
or executive order, upon the mere request of a 
government bureau, nearly every American, for 
several Sundays, voluntarily deprived himself of the 
use of gasolene in automobiles, repressing for the 
common good what is now apparently the chiefest 
passion of mankind. 

Do not understand me to hold that because the 
Mayflower Compact was the first of a long series of 
voluntary agreements for self-government it is there- 
fore entitled to such fame and celebration as if it 
had been the cause of all those that followed. An 
exaggerated importance has often been attached in 
American history to the first time that this or that 
thing was done. The agreement signed in Province- 
town Harbor was in a sense casual, as being due to 
circumstances that had unexpectedly arisen. If 
the Pilgrims had landed where they had expected to 
land, there is no reason to suppose that their form 
of government would have been essentially different, 
or that they would have been governed otherwise 
than by laws of their own making, administered by 
officers of their own choosing. For this we have 
evidence from their patent and from Robinson's 
letter. It may be that in a strict legal sense govern- 
ment under the Compact lasted little more than a 
year. Nor can we think that their agreement stood 
in a causal relation to all the acts of voluntary 
association that followed in that age and in subse- 
quent times. But when we reflect upon the enormous 



33 

importance which has attached, in subsequent 
American history and in that of the rest of the world, 
to the principle of self-government, of government 
based on the consent of the governed, of "govern- 
ment of the people, by the people, for the people," 
we shall surely think it not only warrantable but 
imperative that we should celebrate with grateful 
remembrance the action of those who first estab- 
lished such government on American soil. 

We have met, then, to celebrate the slight begin- 
nings of American self-government, the first mani- 
festation in the New World of that spirit of volun- 
tary association, of self-rule, of submission to the 
majority, of democracy, that has since made the 
conquest of the continent. Where forty-one sturdy 
Englishmen subscribed their adherence to these 
principles in 1620, in 1920 they are the accepted 
doctrine of a hundred and fifty millions or more in 
America and of a still greater number in Europe. 
Democracy at last prevails throughout the world. 

In our gratulation over its advances, we must not 
lose sight of the imperfection with which its prin- 
ciples are carried out. Much of our adherence to 
those principles is lip-service. Rule by the consent 
of the governed, we sadly admit, is far from having 
achieved perfection, either as regards legislation or 
as regards execution. Neither can we yet pride our- 
selves on that whole-hearted submission to the rule 
of the majority which the theory of democracy 
requires. And of course we have to admit that 



34 

democracy at its best has faults from which some of 
the rival forms of government are more free. But 
on the whole it is clear to us that the government 
of plain men by plain men, or, to put it better, the 
government of men by their own wills, in the light 
of what their own minds conceive to be for their 
own joint interests, brings juster and happier results 
in the long run than any other polity. So we rejoice 
in the triumph of democracy and celebrate with 
fervent gratitude the day of its beginning in America. 
The President, with his habitual discernment in 
historical matters, has rightly seen that, in the whole 
story of the arrival of the Pilgrims, it is the signing 
of the Mayflower Compact rather than any landing 
on Plymouth Rock, that most calls for commemora- 
tion three hundred years after, and President 
Faunce in asking me to come here and speak has 
rightly indicated that the beginnings of American 
self-government are likely to be the main theme of 
such a discourse. Yet, for my own part, I think I 
might be quite as much disposed to emphasize and 
commemorate the moral as the political quality of 
the Pilgrims' advent. The best institutions that 
ever were devised will work to good results only 
when sustained by character. Now just as when we 
look about us upon the founders of other repub- 
lics — Mirabeau and Bolivar, let us say, and Gam- 
betta and Lenin — we are filled with gratitude that 
at the forefront of our national history there stands 
the incomparable figure of Washington, as a model of 



35 

unselfish patriotism, of balanced wisdom, and of 
every public virtue, so it has been of incalculable 
benefit that we have always seen, at the threshold of 
our colonial history, such examples of civic virtue, of 
devotion to ideals, of willingness to make sacrifices 
for the common good, of fortitude, of gentle for- 
bearance, and above all, of faith in the future and in 
God's providence, as are shown to us by Bradford 
and Brewster and Winslow and their humbler com- 
panions. We were destined to be a nation of pioneers, 
breaking fresh ground and subduing the wilderness, 
first in the Atlantic coastland, then in the uplands 
of the Alleghenies, then in the boundless West. 
Each community passing through the pioneer stage, 
usually to ultimate prosperity, there was always 
danger that it should succumb to the faults of the 
pioneer and of the prosperous, the rough and 
reckless individualism of the former, the selfish 
materialism of the latter, the conviction of both that 
property is the main good of life, the rights of prop- 
erty the most sacred interests of the race. No one 
can measure the extent to which our communities 
have been saved from such grossness by those of 
their number who at their founding and throughout 
their rank development have remembered the story 
of the Pilgrim Fathers. 

" 'Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay, 
But the high faith that failed not by the way." 

We have the clusters of Eshcol in prodigious abun- 



36 

dance; can we not preserve also the high faith of the 
Pilgrims — their faith in the order of the world, their 
faith in the future, their faith in popular govern- 
ment even when it is administered by a party which 
is not our own, or by persons whom we ourselves 
would not have chosen? 

Multitudes of writers have attempted to set forth 
the quality of the Pilgrim story and the Pilgrim 
character, but after all none has ever set forth that 
spirit so well as the one who did it first, the admirable 
governor of the colony, William Bradford. There 
is a famous passage in his History of Plymouth 
Plantation that we may well take as exhibiting to us 
briefly the whole spirit of the Plymouth experiment. 

"But hear [here]," he says, "I cannot but stay and 
make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poore 
peoples presente condition; and so I thinke will the 
reader too, when he well considers the same. Being 
thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles 
before in their preparation (as may be remembred by 
that which wente before), they had now no freinds 
to Wellcome them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh 
their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less 
townes to repaire too, to seeke for succoure. It is 
recorded in scripture as a mercie to the apostle and 
his shipwraked company, that the barbarians 
shewed them no smale kindness in refreshing them, 
but these savage barbarians, when they mette with 
them (as after will appeare) were readier to fill 
their sids full of arrows than otherwise. And for 



37 

the season it was winter, and they that know the 
winters of that cuntrie know them to be sharp and 
violent, and subjecte to cruell and feirce stormes, 
deangerous to travill to known places, much more 
to serch an unknown coast. Besids, what could they 
see but a hidious and desolate wildernes, full of wild 
beasts and willd men? and what multituds ther 
might be of them they knew not. Nether could 
they, as it were, goe up to the tope of Pisgah, to 
vew from this willdernes a more goodly cuntrie, to 
feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned 
their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could 
have litle solace or content in respecte of any 
onward objects. . . Let it also be considred what 
weake hopes of supply and succoure they left behinde 
them, that might bear up their minds in this sad 
condition and trialls they were under; and they 
could not but be very smale. . . . What could now 
sustaine them but the spirite of God and his grace? 
May not and ought not the children of these fathers 
rightly say: Our faithers were Englishmen which 
came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish 
in this willdernes; but they cried unto the Lord, and 
he heard their voyce, and looked on their adversitie, 
etc. Let them therfore praise the Lord, because 
he is good, and his mercies endure forever. Yea, 
let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, 
shew how he hath delivered them from the hand of 
the oppressour. When they wandered in the deserte 
willderness out of the way, and found no citie to 



38 

dwell in, both hungrie, and thirstie, their sowle was 
overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the 
Lord his loving kindnes, and his wonderfull works 
before the sons of men." 

I wish that students in Brown University would 
make themselves more familiar with the pages of 
Bradford. I should think it a wholly sufficient 
result of such an address as this if I could persuade 
many of them to read at least the first third of 
his book. In the first place, it is in its way a classic, 
with a frequent beauty of phrase that springs 
from the beauty of his spirit, and from his famil- 
iarity with what was to him the one great book, 
though he had read many others. In the second 
place, the reading of Bradford's history could not 
fail to correct in their minds that conception of the 
Pilgrim and the Puritan which so easily comes to us 
from the newspapers and from still more ignorant 
writings, in which what was harsh and narrow in the 
spirit of Puritan and Separatist is so emphasized, so 
exclusively brought into the foreground, that the 
result is but a caricature. I do not think it would 
be easy for any right-minded young man to rise 
from the reading of Bradford without the conviction 
that, whatever in seventeenth-century theology or 
ethics is now obsolete, here is a man with whom one 
could strike hands, with whom one could walk side 
by side, who can typify to us a spirit which, mutatis 
mutandis, we should be glad to apply and to see 
applied in all the communities and all the affairs of 



39 

this great country, that we may advance into the 
future with a firm hold on what is best in the past. 

Men and women of Providence, the history of the 
Hebrew nation was sacred history only because the 
Hebrew thought it so. Are we not as truly a chosen 
people? I wish that we might impose upon our 
minds the habit of thinking always of our own 
wonderful history as a sacred story. I wish that, 
when we read in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews that magnificent bede-roll of the 
great ones of Israel, we should translate it into terms 
of our own history — should remind ourselves that 
by faith our elders obtained a good report; that by 
faith Bradford and Brewster, when they were called 
to go out into a place which they should after receive 
for an inheritance, obeyed; and they went out, not 
knowing whither they went. By faith they sojourned 
in the land of promise, as in a strange country, 
dwelling in tabernacles with those who were the 
heirs with them of the same promise: for they looked 
for a city which hath foundations, whose builder 
and maker is God. Therefore sprang there even of 
these few so many as the stars of the sky in multi- 
tude, and as the sand which is by the seashore 
innumerable. These all died in faith, not having 
received the promises, but having seen them afar 
off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, 
and confessed that they were strangers and pil- 
grims on the earth. For they that say such things 
declare plainly that they seek a country. And 



40 

truly, if they had been mindful of that country from 
whence they came out, they might have had oppor- 
tunity to have returned: but they desired a better 
country, that is, an heavenly; therefore God was not 
ashamed to be called their God; for He had prepared 
for them a city. And what shall I more say? For 
the time would fail me to tell of Winthrop and of 
Williams and of Washington and of Franklin and of 
Adams and of Hamilton and of Lincoln and of 
Roosevelt, who through faith subdued kingdoms, 
wrought righteousness, obtained promises, escaped 
the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made 
strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the 
armies of the aliens. And these all, having obtained 
a good report through faith, received not the prom- 
ise, God having provided some better things for us, 
that they without us should not be made perfect. 



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